In a UMTS Terrestrial Radio Access Network (UTRAN) there are two modes of operation Frequency Division Duplex (FDD) and Time Division Duplex (TDD). In UTRA TDD, which is packet-based, users are separated in both the code domain and time domain. The time domain UTRA framing has 4096 radio frames which make up a super frame with each radio frame consisting of 15 timeslots. A timeslot can be allocated to either Uplink (UL) or downlink (DL) transmission.
In a typical TDD system the UL and DL transmissions have to be synchronized to reduce interference. In addition DL broadcast signaling and UL random access signaling has to be supported. This leads to a partitioning of the radio frame with individual timeslots being dedicated for use either for DL or UL. UTRA specifies the processing that is applied to Transport Channel (TrCH) data by Layer 1 (L1) to build up CCTrCHs. These CCTrCHs are mapped onto timeslots.
Each CCTrCH has a particular set of characteristics, which change dynamically for each CCTrCH that is processed. Possible configuration parameters that may be applied dynamically to each CCTrCH include: number of TrCHs in a CCTrCH; CRC length; transport block size; type of channel coding; Transmission Time Interleave (TTI) period; and amount of physical resource.
An implementation of a CCTrCH processing stack may contain a mixture of hardware and software implementations of individual processing steps. Each processing step requires configuration information.
The conventional approach has been to use a centralized controller for this processing. However this approach has the following disadvantages:                1) the controlling entity must store the configuration parameters for the CCTrCH;        2) the controlling entity must keep track of the CCTrCH as it is processed by each of the processing steps and recall the configuration parameters in order that they can be applied along with the data to the next processing step; and        3) as the amount of output data for a process is not necessarily the same as the input data the controlling entity must calculate and control the following process with this data.        
This conventional approach becomes complex when the configuration data changes dynamically for each CCTrCH as it is processed and the latency through each process changes depending on the configuration itself.
A need therefore exists for processing of data in a communication system wherein the above-mentioned disadvantage(s) may be alleviated.